A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (16 page)

N
ow in a chair with his wrists bound to the slats. He pulled his arm up, and the rope came undone. His face was heavy. His hair veiled him from the spotlights. Gravity was pulling forward rather than down. The chair's legs cut into the cement floor at an acute angle, rather than the right angle, meaning his seat was tipped forward and somehow bolted into place.

—Do you know about Custody of the Eyes? It sounds so much cooler than it is. It's basically, Don't look at hot chicks in church. So we're going to have some really beautiful women dancing around in casting thongs just on the other side of that painter's tape. You won't see any of this because of the angle of the chair and because your . . .

F
acedown on the wooden floor. His shirt was off and his coat was draped over his shoulders. Floor wax caulked his fingernails. The scratches on the floor revealed an almost legible ideographic script. Owen couldn't place the language, but knew it had come from the depths of this fever. Rongorongo? Georgian?

Only my father's son would snap to consciousness and think of arcane scripts
.

—I'm out of film.

—Use the thermal camera. Here, I'll do it.

Owen rolled over to find a yellow plastic housing inches from his stomach.

—Holy shit! He's got a massive fever. Hey, put your arm up next to his. Holy shit! That's awesome! He's like, pink and you're . . . Here, just come look at it. I'll put my arm up next to his.

—That is super cool! He's got to be over forty degrees. But isn't the video too . . . blocky?

—He's blocky. It'll work.

Kurt had at least a dozen assistants. They all seemed to be here.

Owen rolled over and scratched. His fingers flexed until his fingernails bent. Then his head collapsed.

O
wen awoke to find he was no longer the center of the crowd's attention. A green chalkboard on casters presented an equation with multiple integrands, psis, and inverted deltas.

—It's called the Schrödinger equation, Owen. He was a German, you know.

Owen rolled away from Hal's camera. But he couldn't roll away from Kurt's booming voice:

—Why do you think Schrödinger and Goethe, the two greatest Germans maybe ever, both worked extensively on color? We're all artists here, Owen.

Owen grabbed a nearby towel and covered his eyes.

—That's why I, unlike Hal, never shoot in black and white. A genius thinks in color—just to make sense of the thousands of inputs in the world.

Kurt now turned his attention to a girl in a bathrobe.

—He's not going to bother you, is he? He is an Olympic gold medal winner, you know. For swimming. He and I are collaborating on a piece, but he's sleeping now. I've worked for three straight days to make this deadline.

She dropped the robe near Owen's feet. Kurt was actually quite tall now that he was unfolded from his wheelchair and standing. The woman was tall, and she was looking up at Kurt.

—Jesus, you're beautiful.

She laughed.

—I was picturing this with a lot of oil, but I think you look perfect just like this. Maybe we can work up a little sweat. Hal! Are you ready?

Hal finished loading his camera and left Owen.

—All right, Monique, lean over and pretend to write at the bottom of the chalkboard.

H
e woke and was bleeding. Or at least there was blood. The strap muscles in Owen's neck were about to snap. Blood heaved up his shoulders when he tensed, then hushed back down whenever he breathed through his nose. There was a shearing at his ribs—as if someone were carving a much smaller statue of him from the slab of his real body. His head was thrown back so far that he couldn't see the sculptor.

—It's a sponge. Just a sponge, not a Brillo pad. She needs to even out the oil.

Light grew. He mumbled:

—I'm studying at Wittenberg. I need to go to Wittenberg.

—What was that? You need to go to Wittenberg? Hal, stop everything. He needs to go to Wittenberg, wherever that is. You're not going to Wittenberg, my friend!

Owen's hands were now awake. They were bound behind him in a backward handshake. They found thick rope. Nautical rope. His jaw was hinged back, pushed up by some sort of implement wedged into his collarbone. His chest arched out from the strain. He was a Pez dispenser, a prop.

Each breath, an event.

Again, the scratching at his ribs. His wrist stretched the rope until it creaked.

A drop
, Owen thought.
Mnemosyne, lend me a drop. For our waters are Lethe. And these days are endless
.

Water streamed over his cracked lips, and the light dilated until all became white.

—Look at the women clawing at your legs, Owen. I wish I were you sometimes. Just kidding! You're getting all this, right, Hal? It took my assistant all of yesterday to find the right size flange. Your jaw is fucking huge, man. I based it on something called a heretic's fork, which may or may not have been in Abu Ghraib. The blood's not yours. Stay with us, Owen. Hal, get closer. Fucking Falconetti close! Get a couple without Monique and Saskia.

O
wen awoke on a corduroy pillow. Sweat dripped down his inner thigh.

—Grab his hand, Saskia. No. Lace his fingers. Yes. Now you have his attention. With the tip of your tongue. How long can you be attentive, Owen? Owen? Fuck. All right.

—Okay. Someone put his clothes on and take him to the hospital.

Mission University's Eastern Lawn had tried for decades to bury the Classics and Ancient History building. Grass swept into the walls like sand forming banks around a sunken ship. If the building was a ship, then its Corten steel exterior brought to mind a freighter, rusted out and dying above the surface, housing a vibrant reef below. This would make Professor Burr a polyp, a living extension of his coral home. His office was deep in the galley, with a single porthole. One large pane of chicken-wire glass peeked out onto the sloping lawn. On days when they had just mown, the professor could stand on a chair and crane up to see the fountain. But the emerald blades of St. Augustine grass sprigged to the top of the sill mere days after they were whirred down and mulched. While they stood, their edges were brightly parallel, the lined glow of barn planks moting out a summer dawn.

It had rained most of 2004, nearly every day since Owen left home in March. The newscasters were calling it an El Niño year. Maintenance couldn't keep up with the summer rain and the grass had overtaken the window, casting half his desk in streams of white light, half in emerald. Even when they did mow, the maintenance crew now seemed content to let the grass keep its high-water mark above his windowsill.

Burr kept his oak desk bare, his computer jammed against the cement wall. Loose papers he exiled to the credenza behind him, accessible only with a creaky swivel of his rolling tanker chair. Today there were two itineraries on his desk: one brightly lit, the other cast in bottle green.

Burr hadn't heard a word from Owen since March. He had given Owen April to reply to his messages. Nothing. In May, Burr spent $4,000 on a campus security officer moonlighting as a PI—who, as he discovered in June, turned out to lack a passport. Burr then spent $49.78 on a drunken, maudlin heart-to-heart with a phone-in psychic named Amira. She said he needed to see the world through Owen's eyes. When he told her what happened, she said he would see his son, clear as day, if he went back to where Owen lost his eye. He drove to Stanford three times in June to interview players after practice. But none of this had produced a clue about where in Europe his son might be. Owen had been Athens-bound since puberty. The Sydney Olympics had been a surprise, a vacation. Athens was always his Olympics. Burr's best guess was that he would find him there. So both of the itineraries on his desk began in Athens.

The first itinerary had Burr presenting his research in lecture halls that amounted to little more than support groups—half of the twenty-odd listeners would be fellow travelers, tenured professors who wandered the world neither known nor valued by the hoi polloi. After graduation in June, he sent out some feelers and found a few auditoria in Athens where a modest audience would be willing to follow a
Hapax
-related PowerPoint on diaspirates and digammas. He had stretched his itinerary from three lectures to an optimistic six, a sad little triangle into a robust hexagon. Each vertex would afford him another vantage to look for Owen in Athens.

The second itinerary, cast in a green light by the blinds of overgrown grass, had him speaking as a social theorist. This extracurricular adventure was still a secret from the university, but had intensified since Owen went away. It couldn't remain a secret for long. Burr was already making compromises, canceling lectures to meet publication deadlines, showing little concern if his mustache blended into a beard for a few days. Major articles were in press. His fellow contributors wore leather jackets, not elbow-patched blazers. This proposal, this radical course, had no more planning than a message in a bottle; he would surrender to the gyres with the hope that someday soon Owen would unstopper the bottle and find his message. Or, less metaphorically, that his son would finally think that his father was worth getting to know.

If Daedalus couldn't find the dancing path to freedom, what chance did Burr have of leaving the labyrinth of his own devising? Since Caroline, he'd stumbled through his lair, bringing every text, every thought, into the pit of liminality, hoping that something would light the way out. Recovery from what most of his colleagues were calling an addiction rather than a theory had proved particularly difficult, as his original project was designed to
un
cover meaning, to reveal, to unveil. After being outed in tenure review, Burr had to find a cabinet for his curios. His oak desk became the secret tomb of his liminality project. He jotted each insight on its own index card and locked it away in his upper drawer. He read some of them and thought he must have been drunk to write that. He read others and remembered being drunk writing that. On the whole, looking at this early work was the only thing that approximated what he felt when he looked at his son: pure bafflement that
he
had produced
this
. The later work meandered and was different in kind from what he'd produced when Caroline was still around, but whenever he poked around the desk, he found some of the fireflies still glowing in their jars. The morning after Owen left, Burr began rehabilitating his system and hammering in the floorboards of his future stage.

For the ambitious professors of Mission University, it had been like Armstrong walking on the moon when Chomsky sold out the amphitheater and packed a spillover auditorium with students hooting at a projected video feed. Public intellectuals were nothing new, Chomsky himself was far from new, but the recent outpouring of interest in theory was astounding. People wore these men's faces on T-shirts! Burr couldn't help but imagine how he would look in stencil. He had been too young before. He might have even been ahead of his time. Now there was a cult of the difficult, a generation of Web designers who read late Heidegger for sport in their local coffee shops.

The formula for the new public intellectual seemed simple enough: (1) develop a critical lens and then hold it up to whatever young people are interested in; (2) say something outlandish, seemingly at random; (3) through sophistry arrive at the radical conclusion you blurted out at the argument's outset. He had nearly done as much in his four years teaching Plato as an associate professor.

Of course it was hubris to think he could become a public thinker. And it was a stretch to think that Owen would be any more likely to respond if Burr transformed thusly. But it was all he had left.

It had been eight months since Burr first dipped his toes into the water of critical theory. Thus far his biggest following was in the LGBT community, where his article “We Are All Third Gender” (
QT Quarterly
42, 2004) had earned the merit badge of a pink triangle sticker affixed to the glass panel of his office door. He now kept late hours, but never met his one confirmed fan. He liked to think a second fan slapped on the next bumper sticker, a yellow equal sign against a blue background, but of course there was no way of knowing for sure.

Once the second sticker graced his door, he began finding more excuses for summoning faculty to his corner of the building. Occasionally a colleague would ask what the yellow equal sign meant. Burr's reply was always cryptic, chiefly because he wasn't completely certain: “What do you think it means? I can tell you definitively, I'm not interested in math.” When they asked about the pink triangle, his response was equally pithy: “One can be straight, but never narrow.” When he walked through the quad after sending off an article, he liked to imagine every nod of the head was aimed at him to say, “We have read you, Joe. And you have read us.”

One morning tragedy struck. A member of the janitorial staff had taken it upon himself to remove both stickers from the inset glass of door 24B. In that one move, Burr had gone from defender of equality to bigoted brontosaur.

He raced to the bookstore and was able to find a replacement triangle, but not an equal sign. The triangle was the exact same size, but he couldn't remember if his fan had pointed it up or down. He was almost positive it pointed up, but the alternative formed an afterimage that made him waver. Up. It pointed up. He found conflicting arguments online, but in searching he stumbled upon a picture of his missing yellow equal sign. Burr wanted to hug the Internet. His printer traced the text, loudly, from left to right. Cyan would have to do. And not a day after he taped the printout to his door, someone had written “Ha!” in ballpoint pen.

More stickers followed. Half of them proved to be the names of punk bands. For the first time in his career, he felt a part of the university. Still, no one was wearing his face on a T-shirt.